David Wray and Kevin Hansen of Micro Focus Government Solutions said government agencies looking to migrate legacy and modern applications to a multicloud environment should conduct a comprehensive analysis and take into consideration the adoption of standard approaches and enterprise services.
Hansen and Wray noted that agencies should practice caution when it comes to building software factories.
“Instead of creating more software factories, agencies should move toward centralizing software build environments and rationalizing duplicative processes that can be used for both legacy and modern application development teams regardless of their development methodology,” they wrote.
Wray and Hansen called on agencies to develop enterprise services for development teams, standardize tooling for DevSecOps and Agile approaches and create policies that could be used to track insider threats and address risks during the software development process.
Government organizations could use an open standards-based information technology modernization framework to select tools for the software factory in order to facilitate interoperability and “standardize how value and risks are measured for all IT management.”
They said agencies should assess mission-critical legacy platforms using analysis tools that can measure unknown risks and document code and understand where to decouple infrastructure dependencies and move various components.
Hansen and Wray noted that agencies can enable legacy teams to use DevSecOps and Agile methodologies by implementing modern approaches for operating legacy apps in cloud environments.
“Shifting legacy code to modern cloud architecture simplifies application refactoring and enables access to existing IT services to further reduce risk,” they added.
Wray is public sector chief technology officer and Hansen is CTO for alliances and partners at Micro Focus Government Solutions.
